The Great Jock n Roll Single

Jocknroll · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 6:02 pm Post subject: Featured Voters - Album Poll

Dave, Jocknroll Statsmeister, vents his spleen on his favourite and not-so-favourite Scottish Albums:

1. Teenage Fanclub - Grand Prix

Edinburgh College of Art. Saturday night. Pint of Cold Tea* and hearing Sparky’s Deam for the first time. Then hearing the album. Doozy after Doozy after Doozy. There are no bad songs on this. Just great ones and absolutely great ones. I remember it came as such a relief after the disappointment of Thirteen.

2. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Rattlesnakes

Lloyd is the Orson Welles of Jock N Roll: He started at the very top and while he had his moments afterwards nothing matched what he did at the start. How many artists today would name check Norman Mailer and Simone Debouvier? The fact that the bass player now writes about golf for the Guardian takes nothing away from its charm.

3. Simple Minds - New Gold Dream

If they’d stopped here then we’d be talking about the greatest Scottish band of all time. They had a few flashes of brilliance after it but they peaked here. Most of the stuff before this was imaginative; most of the stuff afterwards was commercial. This one managed to balance them both.

4. Belle and Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister

This and Tigermilk come from such a distinct world view and this just shades it because it hasn’t got a long duff song at track 6. It was diminishing returns from here on in. All the other albums aren’t bad as such, just not as good as the first two. Why did he let the rest of them write songs?

5. The Blue Nile - A Walk Across The Rooftops

Try to describe The Blue Nile’s music to anyone who hasn’t heard it and you invariably end up using the word beautiful. There are only a few albums that I cannot listen to bits of. I have to hear the whole thing. This is one of them.

6. Jesus and Mary Chain - Psychocandy

There are great albums you listen to all the time and there are those which you know are great but hardly listen to from one year to the next. Every time I put this on I’m 16 again; what more do you want from rock music?

7. Big Country - The Crossing

Ha! I still think this is a criminally under valued album. Can I point any ‘Doubting Tams’ in the direction of Chance?

8. Primal Scream - Screamadelica

Simon Reynolds writes disparagingly about music post 84 being record collection rock but he can shove his critical rehabilitation of Psychic TV where it shineth not. This is wonderful. When your taste is this varied and you’ve got the balls to pull it off then I’ll take record collection rock over art rock any day.

9. Orange Juice - You Can't Hide Your Love Forever

There’s no definitive OJ album but you can’t have a list without them being here. The only album by the original and best line up. One of the great ‘if only’ Jock ‘n’ Roll moments is to speculate what would have happened if Sir Edwyn had gone with Kirk and Daly rather than stayed with David McClymont and Malcolm Ross. You can prefer the Glasgow School if you’re a purist. I’m not; I don’t.

10. Aztec Camera - High Land Hard Rain

Roddy Frame is the Orson Welles of…no, hang on, I’ve done that bit. There are not 10 songs in the world better than We Could Send Letters.

WORST SCOTTISH ALBUM:

Hue and Cry - Seduced and Abandoned

In 1987 the guy in the next room in Halls of Residence played it far too regularly. Musically bland and painfully pseudo-intellectual. It is absolutely horrible and I heard it often enough to make that as a definite statement. Fake soul and fake jazz sung by someone who thinks he's both a great singer and a great thinker. It's Sh*te!

* Cold Tea was an alcohol mix concocted one night before heading off to Misery (now there was a club). Dave will remind you of the ingredients, which were mixed in a large plastic home brew barrel, if my memory serves me well.
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Statsbunker · Site Admin 2 Joined: 02 Nov 2006 Posts: 68

Senility doesn't come itself TC. You're mixing (up) your drinks

Cold tea was the drink of choice at the Egg in the early nineties. A brown cloudy mix of voddy, tia maria, advocaat, special and lemonade.

What you're thinking of is James Hunt a potent mix cooked up one night in the flat at GayfieldSquare when you made the fatal error of sending boswell and I out for the cairry oot and what we brought back was so unpopular that it was all put in a bucket and termed 'punch' though it was rechristened after the recently deceased F1 driver very quickly. The rest is allegedly history though buggered if I can remember much of that evening. Shocked

Jocknroll · Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 9:48 pm Post subject: